Miley Cyrus “Wrecking Ball” Background Animation
American Music Awards 2013

One of the stranger jobs I’ve worked on, I worked with Logan NY to help animate the singing cat for the visuals behind Miley Cyrus’ performance at the 2013 American Music Awards.

I’ll explain how I fit into this by beginning with a quote from an interview linked below,

“In the beginning we were trying to think of other cats in case we couldn’t legally use that one. But having seen the picture of this sad kitty online, co-director Diane Martel and Miley were set on using that particular cat. So we reverse image searched it and tracked it down to a guy in Japan and Diane’s legal team bought the rights to it.”

This is where I came in.

At Logan, I received a low resolution Jpeg of the cat, which I cut out from it’s background, rigging the eyes and mouth for animation. I animated a test of the cat singing the first verse and chorus of the song, which was well liked. Unfortunately, it took time for the agency to work out the legal rights to the cat, and the delay pushed into the time I had available to work with Logan. So I had to move on to another project before I could complete all the cat animation myself. Even though my role was small, it was fun to suddenly see all the cat memes online after the performance.

CREDITS

My role: Cat puppet rigging & animation

Directed by: Diane Martel & BRTHR
Post: Gustavo Torres/Logan/BRTHR

BTS Interview: 'Weird Enough but Bold': Meet the Minds Behind Miley's AMAs Cat

PRODUCTION